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smart home

February 16, 2017

Research: People Prefer Grocery Stores To Automated Delivery…For Now

You know those time when you’re standing at the fridge,  pulling out the things to prepare dinner, and realize you’re missing a key ingredient?

Frustrating, right?

But here’s the thing: nowadays all this could have been avoided with a little planning and the automated delivery services now available.

And make no mistake: grocery delivery services are popping up everywhere. Some of straightforward online grocery services, while others are increasingly relying on order automation enabled by subscriptions, while some replenishment programs are starting to use scanning devices to monitor use/replacement needs.

But as online replenishment services become more commonplace, the question is will people using them? The answer for now is…maybe not so much. According to a recent survey of over one thousand US Households conducted by NextMarket Insights and The Spoon, it appears most people at this point still prefer the old standard – the grocery store – to procure the groceries they need.  In fact, when asked why people are not using  some form of automated delivery, over half (56%) of respondents said it was because they would prefer to go to the grocery store.

So why would a person prefer going to the grocery store over the clear convenience of automated delivery?

The short answer is a lack of familiarity with new services that are different than traditional services. According to the NextMarket Insight survey,  consumers cite privacy concerns (21%) over having companies using  in-home sensors such as those used with Amazon’s Dash.  Many also feared being charged for unwanted products (11%).

Concerns over automated services do differ by age group.  Respondents under the age of 30 were most concerned about money—having to pay for items they didn’t want.  Older respondents (60+) said privacy was more of a concern, that they felt uncomfortable with sensors in their home being monitored by some company.

The good news is that while consumers may still be unfamiliar with these services, comfort levels can change.  As automated delivery services become more widespread, more common, comfort level will rise.  As with many things that technology brings us, at first there is a great deal of skepticism and hesitancy.  If the product or service, however, is shown to improve on some aspect of our lives, then it will transcend that skepticism and achieve wide scale adoption.  The challenge for automated product delivery services will be to streamline the grocery procurement process, delivering the right goods, when needed, and at minimal cost to the consumer.

February 15, 2017

The Smart Home Insiders: Alexa Ruled 2016; AI, Security And Voice Will Define 2017

In December of 2016, NextMarket Insights and The Spoon surveyed a group of smart home industry insiders to ask their opinion about what they thought about the year that was and what they expected in the coming year for the connected home.

Here’s what we found:

Alexa and voice interfaces were the clear winner in 2016.  7 out of 10 respondents said that virtual assistants and voice control were the story of 2016.

While many expect voice and virtual assistants to be important this year, things are not as clear cut. Many believe the defining story of 2017 in smart home will be the growing need for more robust solutions for privacy and security, likely a direct result of the wake up call that was Mirai botnet attack last fall.  Others see machine learning and artificial intelligence as a candidate for the defining trend of 2017, while a smaller number see mesh Wi-Fi and robotics as important but having a lesser impact.

Many saw 2016 as a disappointing year overall in the smart home, with nearly half (49%) feeling the smart home market didn’t meet expectations last year.  Their outlook for 2017 is a more optimistic – if tempered – one. About 39% see the smart home as having a ”great” year this year, while 54% see the market as performing “Ok”, where it will continue to serve mainly early adopters.

When asked what they saw as the biggest hurdle to the adoption of the smart home, the number one choice by our panel of experts was consumer confusion over technologies and products to choose. Other hurdles to broader adoption included lack of a compelling need for consumers to buy smart home products and too much fragmentation in the smart home market.

These concerns about smart home fed our respondents’ wishes for the future of the smart home when we asked them the one overarching goal they’d like to achieve in the smart home in 2017. Tied for the top response was greater consumer understanding about the value of smart home and reduced fragmentation.

Overall, this survey of smart home experts shows an industry at an inflection point, one that has learned some hard lessons about product value and approachability, the need to industry cohesion and standardization and is starting to coalesce around innovative and disruptive new approaches taken by industry leaders such as Amazon and Google.

You can view the report below:

The 2017 Smart Home Insider Survey from NextMarket Insights

February 14, 2017

Is The Anova Deal The Nest-Google of the Smart Kitchen?

Back in January 2014, I had just caught a ride to the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Consumer Electronics Show when I struck up a conversation with the two men in the back seat of the shuttle. They were executives from Nest, makers of the learning thermostat that had been the talk of the smart home industry for the past year, so I was naturally interested to hear what the company was up to at the big consumer trade show.

While we had a nice conversation, nothing stood out to me when I recalled the encounter a week later other than the two seemed to be in a pretty good mood. The reason I was even thinking about the chance meeting was I had just heard about Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3 billion, a huge sum of money and certainly enough to make any Nest executive happy.

I had similar thoughts a week ago when I first heard about Electrolux’s acquisition of Anova. I had just co-hosted a party with Anova at CES, and while everyone at the mixer had a good time talking smart kitchen with industry colleagues, the only indication from the Anova team that something may be in the works was everyone seemed to be in a good mood.

Last week’s news also got me thinking about other similarities between the two deals.  Much like Nest at the time, Anova was the leading independent startup in a nascent but fast-emerging connected home market, and so their acquisition by a deep-pocketed and established player helps to validate their market just as Google’s acquisition of Nest validated the smart home.

Which naturally leads one to ask, “Does that make Anova deal the Google-Nest of the smart kitchen?”

The answer to that question is yes…and no. In other words, it’s a bit complicated.

In the way of similarities, both Anova and Nest were experiencing fast growth. Anova saw its sales double year over year in 2016 and is on the verge of a million customers in the first half of 2017, while Nest hit the million customer market just around the time of acquisition.

Both deals also came at a time when awareness of their specific markets – smart home and smart kitchen – was starting to seep into the broader consciousness of the early mass market.

And of course, both made connected products with really high levels of consumer satisfaction.

But there are some big differences, perhaps the biggest of which being the types of companies who acquired them.

Yes, both were deep-pocketed suitors, but Google and Electrolux are very different types of businesses with different motivations. For Google, their core business is data and information. Sure, they have dreams of a growing hardware business, but these efforts, including their more recent Google Home product, is often motivated by a desire to further their ability to gather and distribute information to consumers in new and interesting ways.

As the world’s second-largest home appliance maker, Electrolux’s business – and motivations – are much more transparent: With the acquisition of Anova, they now have a new precision cooking hardware line they can sell. Anova and other early precision cooking companies proved this is a legitimate segment and Electrolux now has the opportunity to enter this market in a big way.

But perhaps the biggest difference between the two acquirers is their platform motivations.  Google clearly had platform aspirations with the acquisition of Nest, who’s technology they saw as the foundation for not only more of their own products, but as a platform around which they could offer to the broader industry to build third party products. Sure, the long and complicated story of Nest post-acquisition and the rise of newer approaches such as Amazon’s Alexa have changed the calculus a bit for Google and everyone else, but there’s no question that was the original vision.

For Electrolux, it’s clear they envision Anova’s product line as the foundation for more precision cooking and smart cooking products. And as is often the case when an established company buys a fast-growing startup, I could also see them trying to instill Anova’s innovation-centric startup culture and even let their newly acquired team take the lead on some of those efforts. But Anova’s precision cooking products are not a platform in the same way Nest products are a platform, nor were they intended to be, which is fine because Electrolux is not a platform company in the same way Google is a platform company.

There are other important differences. Valuations are much different today than in 2014. Hardware startups are not getting the same multiples we saw in early 2014.  And while Steve Svajian and Anova’s team are hugely capable, Google paid a premium to get an exec team led by industry legend Tony Fadell, recognized as the father of the iPod, the previous decade’s defining consumer hardware product. And while Anova has certainly filed for patents for innovation related to its immersion circulators, Nest’s IP portfolio was fairly broad in the area of the smart home.

In summary, while these deals have some similarities, in the end, the acquiring companies had very different visions and motivations. Google’s platform-centric vision of the world meant Nest’s technology would soon be positioned as a de facto standard around which the industry choose to coalesce, while Anova’s technology will serve as a platform for a company of one – Electrolux – to launch themselves into the smart, precision cooking market.

February 12, 2017

Podcast: Listen In On Mike’s Amazon Smart Home Consultation

A week and a half ago, The Spoon broke the story about Amazon’s new smart home consultations.

That’s right, Amazon is sending their own employees into consumer homes in seven west coast cities and giving free smart home consultations to help them figure out how to best build a smart home that fits their needs.

Since Seattle is one of the test market for Amazon’s smart home consultations, I decided to have one of their consultants pay me a visit. Not only that, I decided to record it.

Have a listen.

You can download this episode here or subscribe in iTunes here.

February 11, 2017

Amazon Set To Introduce A Slew of Connected Home Hardware In 2017

If you think Amazon’s ready to rest on its laurels with the Echo and Fire TV, think again.

Based on conversations I’ve had with numerous people familiar about what Amazon is planning, the company can be expected to introduce a slew of new products in 2017.

While the details of the products are still not clear, here are a few clues I’ve gathered about what we can expect:

Bold and provocative. Multiple people have told me Amazon is doubling down on their penchant for bold products this year. Amazon both surprised and bewildered many industry watchers with their out-of-the-box approach with the Echo and Dash button, and it’s safe to say we can probably expect more surprises this year. One person told me one or two of their new products are “provocative.” While I am not sure what this could mean, it doesn’t surprise me. After all, this is Bezos and Amazon we’re talking about.

Doing What Hasn’t Worked Before, Only With Over Ten Million Installed Base. One of the people I’ve talked to said Amazon is likely to try things other companies attempted early on in the smart home without success, only “with the resources of a company of more than ten million customers.” My interpretation of this is Amazon’s new products will leverage the Echo installed base that is quickly moving north of 10 million. This also means we can probably expect the Echo to morph into even more of a connected home “hub” with its increasingly robust capabilities powered by a maturing Alexa platform and its growing third party ecosystem.

Leveraging In-Home Consultations. I was the first to write about Amazon’s in-home consultations, and just this past Monday I was visited by an Amazon tech consultant.  While I wasn’t able to wrestle anything out of a very on-message consultant who went by the name of Corey, what this visit did show me was how Amazon could easily leverage these visit to get people’s homes to be essentially “run on Amazon” and introduce new product concepts.

What exactly these products will look like is anyone’s guess at this point. While there have been early stories about new products like a  “kitchen computer,” there hasn’t been much beyond that. Unlike Apple, which in recent years has become as leaky as the early Trump White House, Amazon has become really good at guarding their secrets ever since early word of the Fire Phone leaked. As one person familiar with the company jokingly told me, “Bezos is investing in rockets to send people who reveal secrets into space.”

Amazon knows the result of such secrecy is surprise and intense coverage, both of which feed into Amazon’s ability to convert to sales when combined with front page promotion on Amazon.com.

And now, with the company’s strong success around Alexa and Echo, their intense hiring for their connected product division and their expanded reach into the home through personalized tech consultations, Amazon is teeing 2017 up to be a year of more surprises.

February 1, 2017

Amazon Offering Free ‘Smart Home Consultations’ in Seattle & Six Other West Coast Markets

Back in November, a curious job posting showed up on Amazon’s website for a “home assistant.” The job, which was first flagged by the Seattle Times, sounded more Merry Maid than Geek Squad.

It seemed like an odd direction for Amazon, unless of course it was some way to extend their Alexa dominance. As I wrote back then, “there’s a chance Amazon sees the assistant role as one that will leverage existing in-home technology a creates a home that ‘runs on Amazon.’… Amazon could write off these assistant visits as a ‘truck roll’ investment, one which is paid back through a home fully integrated with Amazon platforms such as Alexa, Dash, commerce, etc.”

And now it looks like I may have been right.

That’s because today I received an email from Amazon offering a free in-home ‘smart home consultation.’ The consultation consisted of a free 45 minute visit from an expert who would evaluate my Wi-Fi signal strength, let me try out smart home products and, of course, test run voice control my home with Alexa.

At the end of the visit, the consultation would create a customized recommendation list of smart home products.

One thing Amazon emphasizes is the expert coming to your home is an Amazon employee. They go on to say each expert has previous technology “experience” and that they have completed over 100 hours of training on products, customer service and “Amazon training.”

Early reviews of the consultations are all pretty good. The earliest reviews for the smart home consultations were in November, but the vast majority have come in the last week, indicating the company is expanding its trial rollout footprint.

The free consultations are currently available in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Orange County and San Jose, California and are being offered to select Amazon Prime customers in those markets.

Why would Amazon do this? That’s easy: they see they have an early lead in the smart home with Alexa and, as I indicated back in November, they can use these consultations to get a consumer to run their home “on Amazon.”

How will Amazon’s move into the smart home and connected home services impact the food and kitchen? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit to find out. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

January 19, 2017

Podcast: Talking Artificial Intelligence With ArchiTECHt’s Derrick Harris

I caught up recently with my old friend Derrick Harris. We worked together at Gigaom, the once-great tech blog, and now, just as then, Derrick is the go-to guy to learn all the latest in the worlds of big data and cloud computing. Most recently he’s been digging deeper on artificial intelligence, so I thought we would catch up and dive deep into what’s happening in this market.

We get nerdy on this podcast, but we talk about how AI will evolve and how it will impact markets like the smart kitchen and the smart home.

You can download the episode by clicking here.

You can find Derrick’s new online home here.

January 14, 2017

The 2017 Smart Home Prediction Show

It’s the smart home prediction show & CES 2017 wrap up all in one super-sized episode.

For this episode, we bring back two of our favorite guests: Nate Williams of August Home and Adam Justice of ConnectSense.

We talk Alexa, Google Home, service provider smart home, smart appliances, smart kitchen and so much more.

You can listen Soundcloud above, subscribe in iTunes or download the episode here.

Enjoy!

December 18, 2016

Podcast: A Smart Home Fireside Chat

Every year (Ok, for the last two years in a row; gotta start somewhere, right?), the folks who talk about smart home at  the Technology.FM podcast network get together to talk about all that happened in the world of smart home over the past year.

This look back (and partial look forward at 2017) includes the hosts of the Smart Home Show and Smart Kitchen Show (me), HomeTech.FM (Jason Griffing and Seth Johnson) and Home:On (Richard Gunther).

Some of the topics we discuss include Alexa and virtual assistants, HomeKit, Google Home, smart home security, artificial intelligence, smart kitchen and much more.

Have a listen above or download the podcast using this link.

December 18, 2016

Smart Home Insiders: Virtual Assistants, Not Kitchen, Story Of 2016

It’s unanimous: virtual assistants and voice interfaces were the smart home story of 2016.

That’s what 138 smart home industry executives told NextMarket Insights in a just-completed survey about the state of the smart home. The virtual/voice assistant category, which includes Amazon’s Echo/Alexa products and Google Home, was chosen as the defining story of 2016 by a large margin, with over 2/3 of respondents (68%) picking the category.

A distant second place was “smart front door”, which includes products such as video doorbells and connected locks, which was chosen by 13% percent of respondents. Smart security and mesh Wi-Fi were both 7%.

Smart kitchen was chosen by only 4% of respondents, which is not altogether surprising given the nascent nature of the category as well as it’s focused nature as compared to a horizontally disruptive technology such as virtual assistants. Technologies like Alexa are seen as having a wide across all areas of the smart home, while kitchen tech impacts a focused area (food and eating).

Even more nascent than the smart kitchen was connected commerce, which includes products like the Amazon Dash button. Only 2% saw this category as the defining story of the year.

November 6, 2016

Jenn-Air Wi-Fi Ovens Add Support For Nest

Often times in the smart home space, companies announce integrations or new functionality that seem…less than useful. Part of this is a result of the race to make the case to consumers that connected devices are going to make their lives better. But sometimes we hear about device integrations that not only seem like a good idea – but also just good common sense.

One example of this is an announcement this week from appliance manufacturer Jenn-Air that it has integrated Nest thermostat functionality into the Jenn-Air Wi-Fi connected ovens. The integration will allow the oven and the thermostat to talk to one another to communicate important information. If the Nest senses that there is no one home but the oven has been left on, it will send a quick notification via the Jenn-Air app to the user to let them know and give them the option to shut off the appliance.

The other integration is even more useful, allowing users to create rules that will change the Nest’s temp settings when the oven is set at a certain temperature. This is an aim to solve a fairly common problem – the kitchen and dining room areas getting too hot, especially in the warmer months, when the oven is on for long periods of time. The custom rules will allow Nest and Jenn-Air owners to be proactive and ensure the rooms remain comfortable during the cooking process. Perhaps the only thing missing from this announcement is an integration between the oven and Nest’s connected smoke detector. The oven is the culprit of many false (and maybe some real) smoke alarms, so an integration between a smoke detector and the oven to determine whether it’s appropriate to switch off the oven in the event of a real fire seems useful.

Jenn-Air has been an early appliance leader in the smart kitchen space, announcing earlier this year a strategic partnership with food data platform startup Innit to bring a new level of intelligence to cooking using their appliances. The new Nest integration will work through the Jenn-Air app and current Jenn-Air connected oven users will receive notification to update the app to the newest version, which includes the added Nest functionality.

Read more about the Jenn-Air news here.

 

October 12, 2016

Why Whirlpool and GE Make “Sabbath Mode” Appliances

“Let there be light” might be an important part of the Old Testament, but for Orthodox Jews, it can be a burden on the Sabbath.

The traditional day of rest, which starts at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday, forbids any work, including turning on lights, ovens, blenders, whathaveyou. That’s why dozens of major appliance brands like KitchenAid, GE, LG, and Whirlpool consult with Jonah Ottensoser at kosher-certification company Star-K to offer appliances with something called “Sabbath Mode.”

The Sabbath Mode

The short version? The Sabbath mode keeps lights off in your refrigerator, automatically ends timers, and so on, so Orthodox Jews don’t have to interact with their appliances.

The long version? Well, in 1997 Whirlpool reached out to Star-K to help the company make Sabbath-compliant ovens. Whirlpool actually patented its Sabbath Mode in 1988, and over time other companies have followed suit, developing software and even special models specifically for this small subset of people (Ottensoser estimates about 100,000 families in the United States).

Here are a few of the specifications:

Ovens

stove_flickranneheathen

Photo courtesy Flickr user anneheathen

Regular ovens shut off automatically after 12 hours; Sabbath-compliant ones keep on heating, so people can cook throughout the day. According to Star-K, “no lights, digits, solenoids, fans, icons, tones or displays will be activated/modified in the normal operation of the oven.” There’s even a built-in delay “between the request for temperature change and its actual implementation,” so you can’t ever be accused of working to change the temperature. Many also have a “timed bake” option, where the timer shuts off after a certain time rather than requiring you to turn it off.

Refrigerators

Lights, digits, icons, tones, alarms, and fans won’t be activated or deactivated when you open or close a refrigerator door in Sabbath mode. Ice and coldwater systems are also turned off, “since they invariably use electrical solenoids and motors to operate.”

A former engineer, Ottensoser works closely with major companies on these alterations, and he has thousands of Orthodox testers double-checking his work.

Why Companies Play Along

ge_flickrflymaster

Photo courtesy Flickr user flymaster

These models aren’t only sold to the Orthodox Jewish community; you can find them at Jewish-focused stores in Brooklyn as well as Sears in Iowa. “That’s the beauty,” said Ottensoser. “They program it into their model universally.”

Yet clearly these companies are spending a significant amount of time and energy pleasing a small group of consumers. Foodtech expert Brian Frank says there’s a reason for that: Appliance companies “want to build products that don’t exclude people, because that means they exclude a market opportunity or some innovation.”

He sees Sabbath Mode as a perfect example of the power of the connected kitchen. One piece of hardware can be programmed a variety of different ways to appeal to different groups of people. In the future, you’ll be able to upgrade your software or even download certain programs in order to expand and change the capabilities on your oven or refrigerator (like we all do with our smartphones, tablets, and computers). So instead of buying oven model GBS309P from Whirlpool as your only Sabbath-Mode option, you’d simply be able to download an app for timed bake, for example.

Frank believes we’ll even have commercial and consumer software options, where the same oven or microwave or refrigerator hardware is used in both environments, simply with different software, thus closing up a longstanding divide in the kitchen world.

In other words, this kind of technology gives “let there be light” a whole different meaning.

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